Abel Ferrara
Siberia

The mists and the snow fading into gray. Trees and dogs, nothingness and vodka. Only ice and silence. The perpetually chiseled face of Willem Dafoe, a pregnant woman, naked. Then suddenly the infernal chasms, black metal clangs, unraveling intestines, purulent flesh. Demonic executions.

The return to theaters with a new film after almost exactly six months could not have been more enigmatic and demanding. Because like certain music (I think of the drone doom of Sunn), cinema sometimes also presents itself as a barely filled page. And it is up to you, spectator-listener, to fill it with meaning, to connect with more or less rational joints the parts that float lost in the sea of possible meanings.

Thus the story of Clint, an austere host in the lands of silence, is only hinted at, minimally suggested by sketched and limping dialogues, in a deformed, strangled Italian. As someone unfamiliar with Ferrara, I found this film both empty and full, somewhat Dadaist, capable of speaking without saying, through a genuinely personal aesthetic tension.

It mixes geometries, colors, extreme alternations of sounds, blood and purity, on a very steep ridge that confuses reality, memories, and imagination. Indeed, in the end, it surpasses these distinctions. Because a fragment of memory of adult Clint returning to child Clint is no less present than the flesh of an ugly fish (that speaks) to chew on in the Siberian night. To survive, in the mind as in the guts.

And so pulses the flesh (alive, warm, lush) of the many women had and lost, like the guilt of Clint as a husband or father. Everything is lost, yet everything is so present. And it clatters with clangs of the soul lost in the tundra.

What is this man doing in the terrible harshness of the north? Does he atone for a guilt, pay his penalty in hell, or is he groping his way towards salvation? Those lost children, the brother, the father... are his faults real or the result of a severe—even unjust—examination of conscience? Is Clint a monster or a Christ bearing the weight of others' sins? Is his only mistake perhaps caring too much?

There is no answer, unless you too immerse yourself in the mists.